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Title: Our Tactics Author: Errico Malatesta Date: 11 November 1897 Language: en Topics: tactics Source: The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, edited by Davide Turcato, translated by Paul Sharkey. Notes: Translated from “La nostra tattica,” L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 35 (11 November 1897).
Rhetoric is an affliction hard to cure, and no mistake. And we are not
talking about the sort of hypocritical rhetoric of the charlatans and
bamboozlers, but the sort that honestly mirrors an exuberance of
sentiment not tempered by a proper consideration of reality.
Some friends of ours, whom we hold in the highest esteem on account of
their boundless devotion to the cause and the useful contribution they
have made and are making to our common endeavors, are unhappy with us,
on the grounds that… we are not revolutionary enough.
We readily admit as much. But is that stance on our part something we
have freely chosen, or is it, rather, something forced upon us by
circumstances? We are inclined to believe the latter, given that so many
of the comrades who would have us do more and who are that much worthier
than us, in practice do no more than we do.
You are out, they write us, to introduce Anglicism into Italy (we would
not even dream of doing so and the reasons are set out below);[1] but,
as a country, Italy is not cut out for legal resistance and slow-moving
organizations. “Even if legal resistance could achieve anything of note,
it would promptly degenerate into rebellions and upheavals, for the
Italian people knows no middle way: it being the lamb or the tiger.”
What! A lamb if you must, but a tiger? We shall let it go, having no
wish to offend tigers. For two or three dozen years we have been going
around saying such things and each time we made to take to the streets
or go out into the countryside, we were lucky if we could muster fifteen
people!
Your paper-and-chatter agitation (they mean the one against domicilio
coatto) is pointless; if the law does not get passed it will be because
of backstairs parliamentary intrigues rather than because of any agenda
of yours. ”We cannot fathom how on earth the domicilio coatto issue
could have become the stuff of backstairs parliamentary horse-trading,
had the people not done a little protesting and some parliamentary
parties not been made to realize that voting the law through might have
been dangerous; it is certainly not out of any genuine love of liberty
that the likes of Zanardelli and Rudinì would have found fault with this
freedom-killing project![2] But we agree entirely that the present
campaign is a paltry affair and paltrier still the part we play in it;
but what are we to do if others refuse and we are not strong enough to
do more?
The need would be for noisy, impressive, threatening public
demonstrations; if, they write us, demonstrations like the one the
shopkeepers organized in Rome were to be mounted simultaneously in
twenty or thirty Italian cities, then something might be achieved.[3]
Agreed, but one would need to be in a position to do that – or
otherwise, have the patience to work away and wait until one can pull it
off.
If only the peasants of Molinella had...whatever you like, but the
peasants did not, and none of our critics (among whom there are some who
did have the material means) stepped in to do it for them.[4] And this
is not to put them down, for we are convinced that, had they stepped in,
they would have succeeded only in having themselves arrested as agents
provocateurs. In order to reach out to strikers and harness the strike
for the advantage of our propaganda and steer it in a direction we think
best serves the workers’ cause, one would need to have had some
involvement in the preparations for the strike or at least have
previously mounted propaganda in the area and won the people’s sympathy;
rather than showing up at the eleventh hour, knowing no one and known to
none.
In short, the counsel received from our friends is what all of us have
been doing, or trying to do, for many a long year, without getting
anywhere; and if our reputation is still good and we still have the
potential to do better, this is simply because we have always paid the
price. We do not intend to travel, over and over for all eternity, roads
that might be summed up like this: six months of quiet activity,
followed by a few microscopic uprisings—or, more often, mere threats of
uprisings—then arrests, flights abroad, interruption of propaganda,
disintegration of the organization… Just to start the whole thing all
over again two or three years further down the line.
We are now convinced (and it took some time!) that before one can do,
one must have the strength to do; and if it takes time to build up that
strength, we will have the patience to wait as long as it takes.
Got that?
Do not call upon us to employ violent language in the newspaper. We
would then be systematically confiscated: our readers would receive the
paper with entire columns blanked out, which would constitute the least
violent and least persuasive of all languages, and then... Well, you
yourselves would be the first to write us off as fools for not knowing
how to avoid being impounded.
Do not bemoan the fact that nothing is being done and no one is being
urged to do anything: instead, let us all work in unison to get
ourselves to a position where we can achieve something of note.
And don’t talk to us of Anglicism. If the word means anything, it means
economic resistance as an end in itself, as practiced by the “old” trade
unions, which, though out to improve the workers’ conditions, embraced
and respected the capitalist system and all bourgeois institutions.
We, on the other hand, believe (and even the English are beginning to
catch on to this) that workers’ organizations and economic resistance
and the whole gamut of more or less law-abiding ways of resisting, are
merely avenues leading to the utter transformation of society. In the
absence of such a transformation, not only can emancipation not be
achieved, but neither will be any overall, lasting, significant
improvement. And we believe, as we have stated time and again, that that
transformation is not going to be achieved peacefully.
Once again, got that?
[1] The charge refers to Malatesta’s advocacy of direct action labor
tactics, such as boycott and ca’canny, which had been used by the
British labor movement for a long time and had been recently adopted by
French syndicalists.
[2] Antonio di Rudinì was the Italian prime minister. Giuseppe
Zanardelli was the president of the chamber of deputies and, as of
December 1897, the minister of justice in Rudinì’s new cabinet.
Domicilio coatto (forced residence) had been in use for years in Italy.
Its use was extended by exceptional laws, introduced by Prime Minister
Francesco Crispi in 1894. In 1897, a new bill was proposed that meant to
make domicilio coatto part of the permanent legislation, de facto
introducing deportation for political reasons as an ordinary procedure.
[3] On 11 October 1897, a demonstration against taxes promoted by the
Roman shopkeepers turned into a street riot, during which a young worker
was killed and many people wounded by the police.
[4] Molinella, near Bologna, was a labor stronghold. Earlier that year,
its paddy workers had won a labor dispute after a forty-day strike that
had prompted the government to dispatch ten thousand soldiers to the
area.